Crops to take a hit as drought hangs on

Updated 7:32 pm, Monday, November 26, 2012

Predictions of a wet winter in Texas have dried up and been replaced by worries about low production on farms and ranches.

“If we don't get any major rains before February, the corn acres will go down,” said Charles Ring, a Corpus Christi-area farmer who is re-evaluating plans to plant wheat this winter and more corn next year. “I'm not sure how it will affect next year.”

He and other agricultural producers had hoped for a wetter winter when meteorologists predicted El Niño conditions, which can bring higher than average winter rains to the Southwest.

But those conditions have not taken hold, and instead, Texas, which suffered through a record drought in 2011, continues to grapple with water shortages in many areas.

The newest U.S. Drought Monitor released last week showed that drought conditions, while better than a year earlier, are worsening. Almost half of Texas was categorized as being in either “severe,” “extreme” or “exceptional” drought — about 12 percentage points more than the share of the state experiencing that kind of drought a week earlier.

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State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said October was Texas' ninth driest October on record, and scarce rainfall in November could make the October-November period the state's fifth driest ever.

“This is certainly not looking good for long-term prospects,” said Nielsen-Gammon, who anticipates that La Niña conditions could arise next winter, which would lead to less than average rainfall.

Travis Miller, a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service soil and crop sciences specialist, said the lack of rain means winter pastures have not greened up and ranchers may be forced to sell cattle again. In addition, farmers might look to plant cotton or grain sorghum because it's more drought-tolerant and give up on high-priced corn plantings.

“It will affect what crops we do have and the inputs we put into those crops,” Miller said.

Texas' corn production this year will be close to average, making it one of the few states to achieve that level of corn output after the drought spread into the Midwest, said David Gibson, executive director of the Texas Corn Producers Board.

Corn prices have fallen a little over the last two months but continue to be strong at about $6.50 a bushel on the December futures market, Gibson said.

He said farmers seeing those prices were hoping to plant more corn. Now, he said, they're waiting to see how much rain falls by early February, just before planting starts, before deciding to switch to less water-needy crops such as cotton.

Texas farmers have planted a little more than the average 6 million acres of wheat this year, said Mark Welch, the extension service's grain marketing economist. While growing conditions are starting to deteriorate because of scarce rainfall, wheat can wait a few more months to get the water it needs, he said.

“We'd like to get more moisture, but wheat is an amazing crop,” he said. “January and February is when we'll know more about how well it'll do.”

If that moisture arrives, it will help livestock producers who can use the wheat for feed and thereby avoid stretching their budgets to buy hay and other costly feed supplements for winter.

But livestock experts said pastures generally have not recovered well enough from last year's drought for ranchers to rebuild their depleted herds this year or next.

David Anderson, an extension service livestock economist, said he expects beef cow numbers will fall again next year, though not as dramatically as they did in 2011.